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How Identity Theft Makes It Harder To Track Down Child Porn Buyers
from the anybody-paying-attention? dept
Several years ago, British police launched a major child porn investigation based on a list of 7,000 people who made credit-card purchases at an American child porn site. There was only one problem: a good number of those people never made the purchases, and were victims of credit-card fraud. The operation has resulted in 2,300 convictions, but another 2,000 people were investigated before charges were dropped, with many alleging they were the victims of fraud or identity theft -- something police apparently were very reluctant to consider. Claiming to be the victim of credit-card fraud seems like a fairly obvious defense somebody could offer in a case like this, but it's one that could probably be verified fairly easily. We should note that the investigative process appears to have worked here, since the BBC isn't claiming any innocent people were convicted, just that they were investigated. However, what's a bit more interesting to note is that the problem of identity theft undoubtedly made the police's job more difficult and contributed to the overall problem. The motivation for child porn buyers using stolen credit cards wasn't just to avoid paying for the material, it was to avoid detection as well. Cut off the supply of readily available credit-card information, and that task is made more difficult. Furthermore, eliminating the cases of fraud would simplify the investigation by cutting out the amount of time and resources police had to spend by investigating the innocent victims of fraud. While the problem of identity theft continues to grow, it's one that few businesses and authorities take very seriously, but it's one that has far-reaching effects.
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this only catches the stupid criminals
this means that you will be missing out on the more savvy (and presumably more proliferate) criminals.
my question is what happened to these other people? are they now registered sex offenders? have they suffered undue public discrace? they may not have been convicted in a court of law, but what about the court of public opinion?
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Re: this only catches the stupid criminals
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Re: this only catches the stupid criminals
Criminal charges based solely on a credit card charge should not even be possible to consider, much less carry out. Also the transaction data was provided by the credit card processing agency, not the website they are charged with using. What is to stop an illegal business from posting charges to a stolen credit card, they themselves stole the info for? Did you know that in most online credit carc portals the muchant is the one that controls the address verification? All they had to do was set it up to accept only the card number, any name, and the expiration, and they could successfully charge the card.
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That is only the half of it..
This was all detailed by Duncan Campbell in PCPro who can demonstrate that a banner "Click here for child porn" supposedly clicked on by all Landslide purchasers would very rarely have been seen even by those who DID buy child porn. Worse still the screenshot displayed in court had been doctored by the policeto make the banner appear right at the top of the webpage, when in fact it was right at the end of a list of quite innocuous banners. This evidence was used in almost all Ore cases, along with the frequent public pronouncments that every Landslide site contained child porn (actually proven to be 12 (arguably 100) out of over 1000 sites.
The police also frequently stated in court and in the media that no-one could end up with illegal images by accident (although this is the main way they track CP sites - by public reporting) and that those caught were a high risk of actually abusing children, when in fact less than 3% of those arrested were ever found to have abused kids. The normal pickup in previous Met, police, child porn cases was 6-7% and yet at the outset local police officers were briefed that at least 33% of Ore suspects would have been guilty of "child rape and bondage"
To anser a previous question - Yes, a number of those who had no illegal images were successfuly prosecuted or accepted cautions and are now sex offenders. Most will have lost their jobs, and many their marriages and kids.
In other cases a handful of potentially illegal images were found, often with no clear forensic provenance but under UK law there is no defence to this 'making' of images.
Ore is and was a disaster. Far far more children were harmed than were ever saved.
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Re: That is only the half of it..
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i hate pedos
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